Australia will make search engines like Google and Bing take steps to prevent the sharing of child sexual abuse material created by artificial intelligence, the country’s internet regulator said on Friday.
A new code drafted by the industry giants at the government’s request will require search engines to ensure that such content is not returned in search results, e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement.
It will also require that AI functions built into search engines cannot produce synthetic versions of the same material, she said. Synthetic versions of the material are also known as deepfakes.
“The use of generative AI has grown so quickly that I think it’s caught the whole world off guard to a certain degree,” Inman Grant said.